Like the protagonist of his film, Nima Nourizadeh’s American Ultra suffers from an identity crisis. The package sounds great on paper: A stoner targeted for elimination by the CIA learns he’s a highly trained government superspy of the Jason Bourne persuasion who gets reactivated in the face of imminent death and becomes a very, very puzzled action hero. That’s the first of the movie’s two faces. The other is a failed somber critique of the very lemon that Nourizadeh squeezes so much lemonade from, the idea that the U.S. powers-that-be are shadier than the Muir Woods and utterly lacking in scruples. But hey, in between commentary on bureaucratic overreach, here’s a dollop of slick hyper-violence.
The film’s Ludlum parody is infinitely more satisfying than its political statements. How could it not be? Nourizadeh has only made one other movie in his career, 2012’s Project X, a frenetic, anarchic take on bad-taste teen romps. What that movie lacks in originality, wit, morality, craft, or redeeming cultural value, it more than makes up for in spirit, which American Ultra has in spades. Taking the movie down a peg for failing to say anything feels like a cheap shot. As a weed-laced riff on spy flicks it’s zany fun, which, when you’re halfway through August and you can see the summer movie season’s finish line in sight, is about as much as you can reasonably expect from Hollywood. As anything more substantial it’s a letdown, but if you’re looking for substance that’s meaningful rather than narcotic from a movie where Jesse Eisenberg plays that aforementioned superspy, you’re toking up the wrong tree.
If not for its mindless, freestyle violence, then American Ultra justifies its existence for putting Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart back on screen together several years after their rom-com duet in 2009’s Adventureland. Eisenberg plays Mike, a twitchy burnout living in a small town called Liman. (Probably not by accident, the burg shares a surname with Doug Liman, who directed The Bourne Identity. Gentlemen, start your winking.) Stewart plays Phoebe, his nearly equally roasted girlfriend. She has the patience of a saint when it comes to Mike, who loves her to death but can’t build up the nerve to propose to her. He has the ring. He just needs the right moment. They plan a trip to Hawaii, but Mike freaks out in the toilet and they never get off the ground. Instead, they wind up on the radar of Yates (Topher Grace), an agency sleazeball out to knock off dormant agency assets as a cost-saving measure. Mike’s attempt to leave town raises red flags for Yates, and puts our hero right in his crosshairs.